Culture and Stigma concerns personal experiences and the cultural self-fashioning of Louisiana Creoles of color, Indians of partly African ancestry, Gullah/Geechees, West Indians, and Africans at Howard University and in its alumni networks. The book explores the role of racism and other forms of stigma in the propagation of ethnic identities.
I completed the manuscript in November.
Candomble and other African-inspired cultural phenomena are often thought to be the products of inert survival. Instead, they are often the products of strategic choice and invention amid ongoing communication by their practitioners with contemporaneous populations in Africa, and with merchants, writers, and politicians from other places and other classes. Throughout the century and a half of their active documentation, Candomble and similar African-diaspora practices demonstrate that transnationalism is not new.
The form and role of orisa-worship among the West Africa Yoruba has changed during the past two centuries in ways correlated with the changing overall political system. The relationships between men and women have provided two majors sorts of metaphor for the healthy and orderly relationship between gods and humans, rulers and subjects. The ritual metaphors invoked by priests and rulers have, in turn, transformed the quotidian relationships between men and women.
A reflection on the historic events of the past 22 years and of the past four years, appealing to the justice-minded activism of the graduating seniors. Also my farewell to Harvard.
Obituary of the doyen of African-American anthropology, Franz Boas Professor Emeritus Elliot P. Skinner, of Columbia University.
The spirit possession religions of West Africa and its American diaspora, like many religions, are inherently transnationalist in their conceptions of the person.
Documents multiple recent cases at Harvard University where critics of Israel were silenced in violation of principles that protect free speech on other topics.
Leading structuralist and Harvard anthropologist David Maybury-Lewis not only studied but also set the standard for culturally informed service and assistance to the indigenous peoples of lowland South America.
US-based feminist anthropologist Ruth Landes introduced homophobic ideas into the Brazilian elite's understanding and treatment of male-loving priests of the Afro-Brazilian Candomble religion. This influence helps to explain the relatively recent numerical dominance of priestesses over priests in this religion.
The distinctiveness of Gullah/Geechee culture is explained better in terms of the people's long-term landownership than in terms of their isolation from other cultures. Alongside the cases of Brazilian Candomble, Louisiana Creole culture, and other African-American cultures, this case belies the racist premise that African culture survives in the Americas only where the alternative option of European-inspired culture has been unavailable for imitation.
Whereas most African Americans and most university scholars regard enslavement as a demeaning condition, many African or African-inspired religions represent slaves as powerful and social hierarchy as a normal condition of life. Indeed, Christianity and Islam valorize slavery and the slave is ways that we seldom highlight or recognize as shaping publicly accepted conduct even in recent times.
The distinctiveness of Gullah/Geechee culture is explained better in terms of the people's long-term landownership than in terms of their isolation from other cultures. Alongside the cases of Brazilian Candomble, Louisiana Creole culture, and other African-American cultures, this case belies the racist premise that African culture survives in the Americas only where the alternative option of European-inspired culture has been unavailable for imitation.
Contributing to the most vigorous debate in Yoruba studies since the 1970s and refuting the widely-cited argument of Yoruba-American sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi, this article offers extensive linguistic, archival, and ethnographic proof that gender and gender inequality have long existed in Yoruba culture, though their terms and operation of gender and gender inequality clearly vary from one society to another.
Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers and his advocates create a self-fulfilling prophecy by declaring all critics of Israel anti-semites.
Like other communities of progressive and highly educated people, Harvard is often in denial about the perseverance of racism. Precipitated by the famous "Quad Incident," in which a fellow student called to police on black students holding a field day on campus.
In recent debates at Harvard University, the discourse of "free speech" has been used to silence civil debate about Israel and its policies.
Whereas most African Americans and most university scholars regard enslavement as a demeaning condition, many African or African-inspired religions represent slaves as powerful and social hierarchy as a normal condition of life. Indeed, Christianity and Islam valorize slavery and the slave is ways that we seldom highlight or recognize as shaping publicly accepted conduct even in recent times.
A detailed description of why the majority of the Harvard University faculty rejected the presidency of Lawrence H. Summers, after which he resigned.
The transnational influence of US feminist anthropologist Ruth Landes and Brazilian nationalist pride fueled homophobia in the treatment of male Candomble priests by the Brazilian state and bourgeoisie. The "cult matriarchy" identified by Ruth Landes in the 1930s was less an observation than a self-fulfilling prophecy.
For centuries, lifeways and political identities in Africa and in many parts of its American diaspora have been re-shaped by the back-and-forth exchange of people,books, musical recordings,and merchandise between Africa and the Americas, recommending that we re-think the analytic metaphors in terms of which the relationship between African and African-American cultures is conventionally described.
Over time, an identifiable but changing set of tropes has organized hypotheses and research in the study of the African diaspora. Those same tropes have consequently influenced the self-conceptions and social organization of African and African-diaspora communities, a fact that deserves recognition in the analytic tropes that researchers and writer employ.
The Afro-Atlantic religions dramatize the idea that the person is a vessel of multiple, largely exogenous beings, monarchs and slaves prominently among them. The sacred icons of Santeria/Ocha, Candomble, Haitian Vodou, Yoruba indigenous religion, Kongo indigenous religion,and the Western-style nation-state are employed to illustrate this principle, as well as the apparent irony that such religions have proliferated in the context of the modern republic and its neo-liberal transformations.
This article is in revision.
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